Internet reports are now circulating that Obama’s Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren, penned a 1977 book that approved of and recommended compulsory sterilization and even abortion in some cases, as part of a government population control regime.

Given the general unreliability of Internet quotations, I wanted to go straight to this now-rare text and make sure the reports were both accurate and kept Holdren’s writings in context. Generally speaking, they are, and they do.

The Holdren book, titled Ecoscience and co-authored with Malthus enthusiasts Paul and Anne Ehrlich, weighs in at more than 1,000 pages. Of greatest importance to its discussion of how to limit the human population is its disregard for any ethical considerations.

Holdren (with the Ehrlichs) notes the existence of “moral objections to some proposals…especially to any kind of compulsion.” But his approach is completely amoral. He implies that compulsory population control is less preferable, because of some people’s objections, but he argues repeatedly that it is sometimes necessary, and necessity trumps all ethical objections.

He writes:

Several coercive proposals deserve discussion, mainly because some countries may ultimately have to resort to them unless current trends in birth rates are rapidly reversed by other means. Some involuntary measures could be less repressive or discriminatory, in fact, than some of the socioeconomic measures suggested.

Holdren refers approvingly, for example, to Indira Gandhi’s government for its then-recent attempt at a compulsory sterilization program:

India in the mid-1970s not only entertained the idea of compulsory sterilization, but moved toward implementing it…This decision was greeted with dismay abroad, but Indira Gandhi’s government felt it had little other choice. There is too little time left to experiment further with educational programs and hope that social change will generate a spontaneous fertility decline, and most of the Indian population is too poor for direct economic pressures (especially penalties) to be effective.

Read the whole thing. Better yet, once you’re done reading Freddoso’s article, check out Zombie’s extensive reporting, as that is where this disturbing story first broke.

The radical anti-life-as-a-way-of-saving-the-planet attitude is not a new one. Several months ago I was exposed to this shocking, extremist belief system after getting into a very heated debate online with a fantatical greenie who actually believes that human life is less important than a “rare marsupial” or “Golden Spruces” and who in fact advocated abortion for population control purposes. Scary stuff. In any event, in spite of the fact that this belief is not a new one, I think this is probably the first time in our nation’s history that we’ve had someone who held those views (and, to date, he has not repudiated them) anywhere close to the WH (on second thought – what’s Al Gore’s position on forced sterilization?). What’s worse? He’s a “czar,” which means Holdren didn’t have to answer to any questions from any bipartisan committee, and didn’t have to be confirmed or denied by the Senate.

It’s becoming quite clear that this administration is going the extreme radical route in the science and climate departments with the respective selections of Holdren and his Socialist “climate czar” Carol Browner. In fact, it’s becoming more apparent by the minute that President Obama, for all his talk of “bipartisanship” is saving his most radical choices for the position of “czar” so – in most cases – they don’t have to answer to anyone but him.

In fact, Fox News reported today that yet another czar may be added soon to the Obama’s already overflowing stable of them: A healthcare czar. How radical will this one be? Maybe we have someone who thinks like Pete Singer to look forward to?

Comments

Great, yet another Malthusian Moron. Naturally it’s always this kind of pinhead that thinks only they are smart enough to run things, despite the fact that they are incompetent. Proven wrong about everything you predict, why, just slough it off, not important, doesn’t mean you’re not still smart, and gosh darn it people like you!

I have a feeling that Holdren will wind up making Lysenko look like Richard Feynman before all this is over.

Glad to see science is back in its rightful place in this admin, i.e. providing BS cover for totalitarian day dreams.

Forced sterilation is nothing new. Seems the Nazi during the 1930’s and 1940’s practiced this on certain groups and some were even placed on trial at Nuremberg. Glen Beck had a related story today on his show and pointed out that the German got many of their ideas from the early American Progressive Movement. On a lighter note—maybe sterilation of some liberals may not be too bad, Ha!

As long as he insists on appointing only those who are certifiably bats**t crazy and/or unders federal investigation, either of these two would be perfect and Ayres has only been under FBI investigation for forty years.

Obama’s highjacking of policy rule to a set of “czars” is only the next step in his run for a communist nation run by “the select few” for the good of the many. As long as there is no accountability for their actions who is to say they’re taking us to totalitarianism?

And people are amazed His Hollowness is placing those communists in places without congressional approval?

Along the same lines, this also goes to show that the green movement (including MMGW advocates like Algore) has nothing to do with “saving the planet” and everything to do with controlling every aspect of everyones’ lives.

Czars don’t have to pay taxes. Not that it matters much. We’re out of money for a long time anyway. Obama has spent the wad and then some more.
Isn’t it about time we have a national discussion on insolvency??? We are fast approaching 100 trillion in debt/liabilities as a nation. China and Russia are openly calling to the end of the “Greenback” as a world monetary standard. China is quickly reverting US.treasury bonds to Gold. Russia and China both are hinting at going back to the Gold standard.
What happens then? Nobody has confidence in the U.S. dollar anymore. The Republicans and Democrats alike have been spending us into very dangerous territory. Obama has tripled down on the foolishness of Bush. The real joke is on the insufferable dimwits that thought Obama was a saviour and all their troubles would be answered with his election.They thought “Freebies” were coming their way. What they got instead was lost jobs, high unemployment, hyper-inflation just around the corner and insurmountable debt laid on their families heads for generations to come.
Add to that legacy, mandatory health insurance on all(Yes a government mandate, everybody will be forced to participate), 20 million new Americans in the form of illegal aliens, high prices for oil and a massive government that watches our every move with suspicion.
It is over unless we stop them now. Obama is a fool of grand porportions.

Can U say Socialism. A quote earlier mentioned Nazi’s in the 30’s & 40’s. Socialism is here now, and has been here 4 almost 10 years. Bush, Obama both puppets, wake up America. Dems…Reps…. No matter… There’s way more to consider. Come out of your slumber B4 it all goes away, and I speak of freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,

The concept is good one, the idea of responsible population control, but when it becomes compulsory is when the government has over-stepped it’s bounds. This isn’t China, this isn’t India. We’re Americans. We believe in the inalienable rights of people who haven’t even been born yet. Education starts at the breakfast table, and I think Obama knows this. I don’t think this yokel is going to have any more effect on American abortion and population control policy than the movie “Juno”. Probably less, actually.

Bill Moyers interviewed Isaac Asimov. He asked Asimov, “What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues?” and Asimov says, “It’ll be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then they both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want, stay as long as you want, for whatever you need. And everyone believes in freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the constitution. But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, then no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there’s no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang on the door, ‘Aren’t you through yet?’ and so on.” And Asimov concluded with one of the most profound observations I’ve seen in years. He said, “In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one individual matters.”

And so, central to the things that we must do, is to recognise that population growth is the immediate cause of all our resource and environmental crises.

Harkens back to the ZPG (Zero Population Growth)crowd of the 60’s….definitely Ayers would be an advocate.

What they seem to leave out is room for natural disasters and epidemics….even HIV. These are the “natural” population controllers in third world countries and even in India, where infant mortality rates still remain high.

Of course if we have government run health care we might experience an increase in morbidity and mortality rates in this country that would “adjust” the nasty human resource wasters and environmental spoilers…US!

F. Magyar, Asimov’s analogy breaks down as soon as you stipulate there are other apartments with bathrooms in the world. That’s where all of the Malthusians fail – it never occurs to them that more bathrooms can be built. Their scenario only works if you postulate a zero-sum game and forbid the development of new resources and improvements in technology.

Which, now that I bring it up, is exactly the strategy of the radical greens. By forcing constraints upon the human population they hope to make inevitable their eugenics fantasies.

Every one of these Malthusians seems to ignore a basic fact of life, that is that population growth slows and even goes negative naturally, in mature, technologically advanced, stable societies.

They want to force these said societies backwards into poverty and privation, not lift the other societies up to the same level of wealth and prosperity, where they would naturally slow their expansion of people. Look at all the modern societies, Japan, Europe, US, all with their main population growth coming from immigration.

These nit wits always assume there is only one, small pie to distribute, rather than working on ways to increase the size and number of pies.

People who claim they want to “save” the world really want to control it for their own selfish reasons.

But hey, their banning of DDT sure has helped, why, think of the tens of millions of “undesirable” children killed in those poor countries. That’s right up these idiots alley.

Sevarian, are you implying the United States is a “mature” and “stable” society? On what do you base that? I mean, we voted His Hollowness in as prez (highly immature and dysfunctional), and will sometime in the next year award citizenship to some twenty million criminals who invaded our country, stole our services and taxes and are reproducing at a rate that would make the ZPG’rs go absolutely bonkers.

And I’m not real sure our “technological advancement” isn’t an advance to the rear, but that’s an entirely different discussion.

But hey, their banning of DDT sure has helped, why, think of the tens of millions of “undesirable” children killed in those poor countries. That’s right up these idiots alley.

Exactly. Have you noticed how all of the Malthusians (and I mean all of them) have clean water to drink and plenty of food, and sleep between clean sheets every night? Their world does not include watching their children die from malaria, cholera, and a host of other easily preventable/treatable diseases.

I am not in favor of any form of population control that is in any way human directed, but what about just abolishing the idea that we have to make the world safe enough for the biggest idiots out there. Really, all I’m asking for is that manufacturers be allowed to make “dangerous” products again as long as they don’t try fooling anyone about their safety. I for one would *like* to buy one of those 3 wheel ATV’s that were outlawed in the 80’s, and if I happen to kill myself with it, then I guess that helps out the rest of you.

Steve — you can’t continue to build bathrooms if you run out of rooms AND resources. There is a tipping point inherent in all natural systems, whereby the system will eventually be destroyed. It doesn’t matter what achievements you’ve realized as a society — reaching that tipping point signals the erosion of the planet. We have reached that point, and are dealing with the consequences.

Sure, there’s natural disasters and diseases as a population control. The Black Plague and the unusually harsh European cold spell of the early medieval period spring to mind as examples. But the human population has grown since then, hasn’t it?

I’m NOT advocating sterilization. But what I am saying is that people should be conscious of these issues and consider the implications of having very large families.

Well of course let’s keep more children from being born! By all means! That way, we can keep all of the morons that are already here, mismanaging our government, warring with each other, or already meting out their own brand of genocide. WHo gets to decide on who gets to reproduce?
Smells faintly of the fox guarding the hen house…

We aren’t even close, unless you believe that BS garbage that Al Gore sputters.

The problem is you all just look at the surface of things. There are all sorts of things and possiblities that can be done, and are yet to be discovered. Remember how we were “running out of oil”?? Now we have found reserves that we can get to, that will give us oil for at least 100 years maybe longer. Yet we are running out. The deepest mine ever is a diamond mine that is about 2 miles deep. Figuring the diameter of the earth, off the top of my head, is like 8,000 miles or so, which means we haven’t even scratched the surface of any potential the earth has. In 100 years we went from wind power to steam to diesel to nuclear power ships, what says that in another 100 years we don’t do even greater things.

Why limit us now with this Chicken Little garbage?? Give it up, this is not about care for the earth, it is about controlling people. Yes, let’s conserve where needed, lets recycle what we can, but let’s have a second look at some of this of the people who are in control. Power hungry pukes. The same people who blame a light bulb for our energy problems but yet won’t let us make a power plant until we know for certain that no earth worm will be killed.

Also, isn’t is ironic, how the same people that tell you not to have children, provide a baby factory like our current welfare system. These people are just a joke. – Lorica

Bangladesh is a small country the size of the state of Alabama. Yet, Bangladesh has a population today of 160 million people (Alabama has 5 million). And yet, the fertility rate in Bangladesh is still 3.0. That’s right, the average Bangladeshi woman today will give birth to 3 children in her lifetime. So the population of Bangladesh will keep growing and growing, even as the sea level keeps rising and rising, inundating that low-lying country more and more often as the century wears on. The situation is insane. Think about it.

And then consider India. India already has 1.2 billion people. And guess what? Its average fertility rate today is, again, 3.0. That means India’s population is still growing, and rapidly. It is projected to reach 1.7 billion by 2050.

These are just the worst cases of overpopulation in the world today. There are plenty of other runners-up in the race to catastrophe.

Sterilization will eventually be absolutely necessary in some places in order to keep world population in check. Unless, of course, you prefer the natural alternative, mass famines. The only question is: how horrendous will the poverty and overcrowding get before that step is taken?

Well John, the rest of your opinions are as incorrect as your spewing the same sea level rise drivel about Bangladesh. The sea is not rising, they are getting flooding and inundations because it’s the end of an alluvial plain of sediment that is subsiding and eroding out. But it’s hard to blame that on people, so there you go, that’s why the sea level trope gets trotted out all the time.

And once again, why are the birth rates so high? Neither place is a stable, mature, prosperous technologically advanced society, yet. India is making great strides towards that goal.

There is a tipping point inherent in all natural systems, whereby the system will eventually be destroyed. It doesn’t matter what achievements you’ve realized as a society — reaching that tipping point signals the erosion of the planet.

Sorry, but our economy and its technological achievements will be destroyed by collectivist policies long before we reach this mythical tipping point. This has always been true in human history.

If you will take some time and reconsider the matter carefully, I think your views may change somewhat.

For starters, whether the future floods in Bangladesh will be caused, as you say, by mere subsidence of soil, or, as I and many others say, by rising sea levels, or by both, is a question rather separate from that of its population problem.

But what on earth are 160 million people doing packed together in such a tiny space, exposed to such inundation, whatever its cause? I would like to see them tackle the immediate problem of their overpopulation, which would require only a limited effort (e.g., a “2 Kids Max” public campaign), rather than try to turn their entire impoverished country into your dream nation of a “stable, prosperous, advanced, technological” wonder overnight. There are some fine examples of poor Third World countries which, through wise government policies, have already gotten their fertility rates down to the reasonable level of around 2.1. But we need many more such responsible nations in the world, because the majority still have fertility rates up around 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0. India is making some strides toward modernization, but it would take decades more to succeed, and before then their increasing overpopulation problem may breed more chaos and sabotage such modernization. Besides, Severian, you seem to accept the wisdom or necessity of a low (or stable) birth rate, but you want a “changed society” to bring it about discreetly and indirectly. What is wrong with facing the overpopulation threat directly? Incidentally, I challenge you to spend your next vacation in India, travelling widely there, seeing, smelling, and feeling all the squalor and misery and poverty and crowding. I bet you’d be more sympathetic to the idea of sterilization for some people after that. I’ll even give you a hundred bucks if you do go. Deal?

As for Mwalimu Daudi, who is responding to a previous poster, his statement seems self-contradictory: “… our economy … will be destroyed by collectivist policies …. This has always been true in human history.” But, Mwalimu, how can collectivist policies have “destroyed” humankind if humans have always kept bouncing back? It seems to me that excessive collectivism, just like excessive individualism, may spell ruin, but that a balance can be found. I’m a political independent, “liberal” on some issues, “conservative” on others (and wishy-washy on still others). I invite you to join the club.

John, I’m a physicist with 30 years experience in everything from modeling and simulation, to atmospheric physics. I have heard the bleatings of the Malthusian doomsayers for nigh on 50+ years now, and their ramblings have never stood up to any kind of logical, reasoned analysis. Continuing to misrepresent catastrophe theory by shrieking about tipping points is either a willful deceit or just plain ignorance, never has a mathematical theory been more misused for evil PR reasons.

You do understand what the “precautionary principle” really means don’t you? It translates into “I wanna force you to do something but I have absolutely no evidence to support me, so I’m gonna attempt to scare you into doing it.”

The thing that so often irritates me about people with your viewpoint is that the things they espouse, allegedly because they are so concerned about these poor crowded masses in poor countries, always, and I mean always, results in death and privation for the very poor they claim to be concerned about. Everything from the idiotic lies about DDT and malaria, to global warming BS that means we have to restrict energy production, everything is geared towards keeping the world’s poor, and pushing the wealthy, into brutish, short, and uncomfortable lives that humanity has spent the past several thousand years working and struggling to put behind us.

The problem with you and your sky is falling fellow travelers is that you seriously need a traditional religion, one that sets up your so obvious desire for original sin, guilt, punishment, and redemption in a way that doesn’t make you gullible for every faddish pseudo-scientific con that comes down the pike, or leads you to work for worsening the human condition.

But, Mwalimu, how can collectivist policies have “destroyed” humankind if humans have always kept bouncing back?

You distorted what I said. I argued that the heavy-handed collectivist politics favored by population control advocates will have destroyed an economy (and, sometimes, much of the population with it) long before overpopulation will. China may have it’s population growth under “control” (whatever that means), but at a horrific cost. I for one have no desire to live in what may be history’s biggest concentration camp.

Your post reflect a serious lack of knowledge of history (not to mention current events). Freedom, once lost, is enormously difficult to get back. Russia now groans under a dictatorship hardly any different from the former Soviet Union. Germany is a free society, but it took a world war to topple Hitler.

I would like to see them tackle the immediate problem of their overpopulation, which would require only a limited effort (e.g., a “2 Kids Max” public campaign), rather than try to turn their entire impoverished country into your dream nation of a “stable, prosperous, advanced, technological” wonder overnight.

“Limited”, eh? Take a look at China, which has a “one child” policy. Not exactly a land flowing with freedom and opportunity! Any government that enforces policies which limit human procreation is by definition a totalitarian government – complete with gulags, thought police, poverty, and (above all) fear. And some folks in this country fear the right-wing Bible-thumpin’ Christianists they profess to see under every bed! What about the population-control advocates actually in the bed?

There are some fine examples of poor Third World countries which, through wise government policies, have already gotten their fertility rates down to the reasonable level of around 2.1.

Such as? Let’s have some names, so we can check facts and see just how “wise” these policies actually are. Don’t hold up China as your shining example, since it is a dreamland only for tyrants.

Incidentally, I challenge you to spend your next vacation in India, travelling widely there, seeing, smelling, and feeling all the squalor and misery and poverty and crowding. I bet you’d be more sympathetic to the idea of sterilization for some people after that. I’ll even give you a hundred bucks if you do go. Deal?

Having lived and taught in a poor African country for nearly a decade, I can answer that. I didn’t just “see, smell and feel” poverty from a hotel room or the back of a taxi – it smacked me in the face every day as I wrestled with it. Safe to say, when confronted with poverty my first impulse was not to say, “This can be solved directly by a wise government policy of population control.” I preferred the indirect method of alleviating suffering. Furthermore, I can assure you that population control is not on the minds of the population in question. Filling their bellies is.

Solving a society’s population “problem” by absolute government control is no solution at all.

I’m forced to make one further observation John. You, like just about every other person I’ve ever run into who peddles this lunacy, when the “facts” you use to argue your point are pointed out to be false, you come back with a “well that doesn’t matter” and slide into more predictions and hand waving. Here’s a hint, if your facts are incorrect, if you can’t even get that right, what credibility should anyone give to your fantasies?

And about 8+ out of 10 people I’ve ever run into who buy into this malicious ideology, about how we have to limit population or we’re all Dooooooomed!!! are also the same ones who want animal rights to trump farming, free range this and that, and are against the use of chemicals in farming, and against energy production. So, the very things that are used to feed, cloth, and care for people and are used to prevent the kind of meltdown you dream of, are the things you want to curtail. You want, nay need, a self fulfilling prophecy. I suspect that many of you demented types want to curtail people so you don’t have to eat animals, which is a bass ackwards approach. I’ve noticed that people who want to treat animals like humans also have no problems treating humans like animals, see forced sterilization, and such.

MD observed “Such as? Let’s have some names, so we can check facts and see just how “wise” these policies actually are. Don’t hold up China as your shining example, since it is a dreamland only for tyrants.”

I suspect, if he can come up with anything at all, it will be one of those countries with staggering childhood mortality due to malaria and other mosquito borne diseases. Gotta keep that DDT banned you know, can’t let the plebs breed uncontrolled. That things like this seem a better solution than trying to lift the people out of poverty and into prosperity thru education and good government (instead of tyranny) says volumes about the morality and ethics of these types.

I find your language overly emotional and your two messages to me very largely lacking in reasoned points to which I can even respond. The sheer number of your barbed words is astonishing.

Your “physicist” status does not impress me in the least. I’ve known many scientists who were hateful religious fanatics. I’ll hope you are not that far gone.

A question for you: Why would a policy of 2 children maximum in Bangladesh result in more “death and privation” than the alternative of doing nothing at all? How many people do you want to see in tiny Bangladesh – 200 million? 250 million? 300 million? More? As of today, about 30 million of the 160 million there are starving on a daily basis. And many thousands die needless deaths.

And how many people do you wish to see on the earth as a whole? We’re now at 6.8 billion (way up from about 2.5 billion when you, Severian, were born only several decades ago), and we are expecting to reach 9-10 billion by 2050. Do you want that number to go even higher? 12, 14, 18, 22 billion? Come on, give me a number that you would consider the limit. And then tell me where we would put them all. And please don’t say “in my neighborhood Catholic church.”

Really, Severian, it is a well-established fact that the Third World (not all, but most of it) has the highest fertility rates in the world today, which means that a generation from now we will have a much higher percentage of impoverished, starving people in the world than we have today. That is a horrible prospect.

It is also very unfair of you to lump me in with the radical left. I clearly stated that I was not a lefty.

As for those Third World countries which are now admirably managing to keep their fertility rates down to modest, relatively stable levels (around 2 – 2.5 births per woman), please check “world fertility rates” by country on any number of web sites. There you’ll find some good examples (even our neighbor Mexico is now down to about 2.3), but also many bad examples (e.g., Mali at 7.3!).

Ready for that Indian dream vacation yet, Severian? My $100 offer to you is still open!

John, the fact I don’t “impress” you causes me no end of joy, given the type of illogical, repressive, and pseudoscientific babblers who obviously do.

I have seen no indication of much in the way of reasoned thought out of any of your ramblings here. You will never apparently get the fact that the basic core of your ideology is not concern for the environment or people, but control and dictating to people how to live. And believe me, you are a prime example of the type of person who should never be given authority over anything or anyone more than maybe a kitty kat.

I have been to India you twit, and other wonderful garden spots. I saw nothing there to make me think that their lot would be improved one bit by more authoritarianism or the deluded ramblings of another boneheaded liberal Malthusian. But, feel free to go try and sell crazy in India, we have more than enough here.

Oh, and btw, before you wring your little hands raw worrying about world population, you could put all the 6 billion people of the world in Texas and have a population density only a third of Manhatten. We’re obviously doooooomed!

I trust there are many Americans, and at least a few readers of this blog, who do not wish to see South Florida, Southern California, and the Greater New York City area with twice as many people as they have today. But that situation is coming, because, around mid-century or so, we will have 500 million people in this country due to the continuing explosive population growth in certain other countries around the world and the desire of many of those people to escape their crowded and impoverished home conditions and get to the U.S.A.

Some of you following this blog might wish to read the recent issue (June? July?) of National Geographic magazine, which has a thoughtful and very factual article on the worsening world food shortage. Please obtain it at your local library. Please see also the link that Fred Magyar usefully included in his posting earlier in this thread. It is a great link, full of hard science and wisdom.

Thanks for listening and good luck to all of you. I’m retiring from this discussion now.

John that old red herring of OVER POPULATION has been the foil of many old hippies…I heard the same tripe when I was in high school and back then we were supposed to be in the middle of an ice age by now….hmmmm, okay maybe they were talking about “climate change” not global warming. And the ZPG people had even more dire warnings about our endless replenishing of the human race….so this is sort of a been there done that thing for me. It only makes sense that Obama would appoint someone with these ideas…just like siting though all those years at Dr. Wright’s church and tea time with the Ayer’s family…the radicals have all gone establishment, man.

“I trust there are many Americans, and at least a few readers of this blog, who do not wish to see South Florida, Southern California, and the Greater New York City area with twice as many people as they have today.”

There’s the real reason behind growth restrictions, building restrictions, and anti-population misanthropic armchair totalitarians like John. The “we got ours now stay out” mentality. Hey, I like my view and such, you peasants just need to stay away in your hovels and leave us superior types to enjoy the good life.

And Natl Geo, sad to say, has become a mouthpiece of far left ideology like global warming and ZPG (still have damned fine photographers though). It’s ironic that the same people bleating about impending doom from starvation and privation are the very ones who try and shut down GMO foods, efficient farming, use of pesticides like DDT, etc., i.e. the very things needed to avert the catastrophe they are whining is imminent. Well, if you put them in charge, the doom and gloom are indeed imminent, due to their actions and policies.

Bullsqueeze, it’s a propaganda op ed piece masquerading as factual. Funny, several pages of text, and not one footnote or reference listed. Take a look at something like the evil CEI or Heritage Institute put out, extensively referenced and footnoted so you can actually read the sources they used in their conclusion.

Here’s what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: “Frankly I had thought that at the time (Roe v. Wade) was decided,” Ginsburg told her interviewer, Emily Bazelon, “there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.

The comment, which bizarrely elicited no follow-up from Bazelon or any further coverage from the New York Times — or any other major news outlet — was in the context of Medicaid funding for abortion. Ginsburg was surprised when the Supreme Court in 1980 barred taxpayer support for abortions for poor women. After all, if poverty partly described the population you had “too many of,” you would want to subsidize it in order to expedite the reduction of unwanted populations.

Ginsburg’s certainly right that abortion has deep roots in the historic effort to “weed out” undesired groups. For instance, Margaret Sanger, the revered feminist and founder of Planned Parenthood, was a racist eugenicist of the first order. Even more perplexing: She’s become a champion of “reproductive freedom” even though she proposed a “Code to Stop Overproduction of Children,” under which “no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit.” (Poor blacks would have had a particularly hard time getting such licenses from Sanger.)

If Ginsburg does see eugenic culling as a compelling state interest, she’d be in fine company on the court. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a passionate believer in such things. In 1915, Holmes wrote in the Illinois Law Review that the “starting point for an ideal for the law” should be the “coordinated human effort … to build a race.”

In 1927, he wrote a letter to his friend, Harold Laski, telling him, “I … delivered an opinion upholding the constitutionality of a state law for sterilizing imbeciles the other day — and felt that I was getting near the first principle of real reform.” That was the year he wrote the majority opinion in Buck v. Bell (joined by Louis Brandeis) holding that forcibly sterilizing lower-class women was constitutional. In recent years, openly discussing the notion of eugenic aspects of abortion has become taboo. But as Ginsburg’s comments suggest, the taboo hasn’t eliminated the idea; it’s merely sent it underground.

To be sure, some heterodox liberals speak up. The writer Nicholas von Hoffman has written: “Free, cheap abortion is a policy of social defense. To save ourselves from being murdered in our beds and raped on the streets, we should do everything possible to encourage pregnant women who don’t want the baby and will not take care of it to get rid of the thing before it turns into a monster. …”

In 1992, Ron Weddington, co-counsel in the Roe v. Wade case, wrote a letter to President-elect Clinton, imploring him to rush RU-486 — a.k.a. “the abortion pill” — to market as quickly as possible.

“(Y)ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country,” Weddington insisted. All the president had to do was make abortion cheap and easy for the populations we don’t want. “It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it. … Think of all the poverty, crime and misery … and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don’t have a lot of time left.”